Chechens fear jihadist threat from their teenage sons
Authorities are struggling to deal with new, younger generation who have been radicalised online
in Shali, Chechnya
THE video seemed like a nightmarish parody of Islamic State. Filmed on a smartphone, four boys, one only 11, pledge allegiance to the terror group.
“We promise fear and death in the hearts of unbelievers. Victory or jihad!” the boys chant, as the youngest brandishes a knife and an iPhone displaying Isil’s black flag.
Soon after it was filmed last month, the boys would be killed in an assault on police in Russia’s Chechnya republic, where a string of attacks involving teenagers has left the authorities struggling to suppress “child terrorism”.
The Aug 20 incident, involving four underage cousins and their 18-year-old neighbour, marked the youngest attack yet. A relative, who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal, told The Sunday Telegraph that the boys had come under the influence of their older neighbour and been “zombified” by Isil.
“What can you say to a mother whose sons were killed at the same time, who knows that neither one will come back? It’s better to have daughters than sons,” the relative said. “Isil have got to the children now.”
Only three months prior to the August attack, four teenagers yelling “Allahu akbar” shot a worshipper and two police officers dead before being killed trying to storm a church in Grozny, the Chechen capital. Five teenagers were also killed in a December 2016 attack.
With extraordinary leeway from Vladimir Putin, local leader Ramzan Kadyrov had largely rooted out the Islamist underground in this once wartorn region in recent years, albeit amid accusations of torture and extrajudicial killings. Hundreds of extremists left Chechnya and Russia to fight with Isil and other jihadists in Syria and Iraq.
But they left behind a younger generation, radicalised on the internet rather than in mountain hideouts, among whom violence is on the rise again. Seven of 10 fighters killed in clashes in Chechnya in 2015 were younger than 35, while 20 of 22 killed in 2016 were younger than 35, according to the website Caucasian Knot.
Five teenagers were among those killed in an attack on police in Grozny in December 2016, sparking a brutal crackdown by security forces.
Chechen authorities have said they are working with children and parents to prevent such tragedies, but activists argue that heavy-handed methods such as rounding up teenagers and exiling their relatives only increase resentment of the repressive regime.
“We are seeing the rise of a new generation of jihadists,” said Ekaterina Sokirianskaia, director of the Conflict Analysis and Prevention Centre. “The older generation was worn out by war. These kids are rising up not against war but against Kadyrov, in the most meaningless and radical way.”
With little in the way of hierarchy or organisation, the youthful new face of terrorism is even more unpredictable than the forest insurgents it replaced.
No one in Shali suspected anything was amiss with the four cousins, prize- winning amateur kick-boxers who came from an extended family of doctors and were not especially religious. Elakh Akhmatkhanov, 17, was to begin his studies at a medical institute in a nearby region within days.
Neighbours said they were “ideal” kids who appeared to be under “hypnosis” in the Isil video. But during the summer they came under the influence of the troubled Magomed Musayev, 18, who had briefly been detained as a suspected militant in January 2017.
After his release, Musayev was sent to study in another region, where he bought his first smartphone and became a target for Isil’s online recruitment of teenagers. He exchanged encrypted messages with Lev Tokhosashvili, also known as Emir al-Bara, an ethnic Chechen Isil leader killed in Syria in late 2017, according to Apti Alaudinov, head of Chechnya’s police. And he started to pray in nearby Khasavyurt, a hotbed of fundamentalism.
Since last year, officials, imams and police have been visiting schools to warn against extremism. “Don’t talk to
‘What can you say to a mother whose sons were killed, who knows that neither one will come back?’
unknown people on the internet; don’t download videos; think about the consequences,” Zagidat Abakharova, a young mother who had two children in Isil-held Syria after travelling there with her husband in 2014, told a classroom of Chechen tenth-graders. Mrs Abakharova was sentenced to eight years in prison after escaping Syria and returning to Dagestan in 2017, but won’t be sent to jail until her youngest child turns 14. In the meantime, she volunteers in a bid to stop other children suffering at Isil’s hands.
But local anger is growing over the authorities’ heavy-handed tactics. In the wake of the August attack, Chechen security services immediately detained relatives and dozens of other males in Shali, many of them teenagers.
Relatives of the boys say officers should not have shot to kill their attackers, who injured, but did not kill, police. “They could have detained them, stopped them,” a relative of the boys said. “Even if someone kills a person, he goes to court.”
Mr Alaudinov said widespread detentions, even with occasional legal violations, were necessary to prevent further attacks. “It’s a big problem for us that such a young child could get into this,” he said, promising more “prophylactic” talks with schoolchildren.
But security crackdowns, exacerbated by social inequality and the rigid form of Sufi Islam allowed by the authorities, may only increase the sense of injustice that international studies have shown is a prime reason young people join terrorist groups.
A 2015 survey of 80 fourth-year university students found that all but one wanted to leave Chechnya.
“The level of fear in Chechnya has hit the ceiling,” said Yelena Milashina, who covers the region for the Novaya Gazeta newspaper.
“But this feeling of injustice that leads to terrorism and revenge, it’s growing even more.”